


live now, steady, love

by owlerie



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Divergent, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, and a new years party, au where the avengers never broke up basically?, if i can be in denial and pretend civil war and on never happened so can you, its a christmas party, kind of? kind of.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23991661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlerie/pseuds/owlerie
Summary: it's christmas eve, the avengers are in the hamptons, and steve lets himself fall in love.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 94





	live now, steady, love

**Author's Note:**

> in desperate need of soft happy avengers fic after marathoning the entire mcu. enjoy!

The Christmas party is in full swing inside Tony’s beach house, carols ringing joyfully even through the walls, the lights strung up along the roof and the porch railing giving the night a faint, warm glow. Through the half-open doorway, Steve can hear the sounds of glasses clinking, of drunken singing and laughter filtering out into the night air. 

Tony had all but jumped at the chance to host the party, not that anyone ever expected him to turn down the offer of booze and music. It’s far, of course, the beach house is hours out of the city -- but Steve had just bundled into a cab with Clint and Natasha and split fare, stopping to pick up Bucky on the way with an apologetic explanation of _I can’t ditch him on Christmas, really._ Natasha had just laughed and said that any friend of Steve’s was a friend of hers, and had folded Bucky into their little patchwork group as quickly as she had done with Steve himself. 

It’s like watching the television from outside a window - the conversations inside are muffled, floating incoherently out into the night, to where Steve is sitting on the edge of the porch steps, slumped over against the railing. He’s got a soda in his hand, pushed onto him by a much drunker than usual Clint who had muttered something about needing to stay hydrated.

When the door creaks, he doesn’t look up, but he knows by the footfalls that it’s Tony.

“All by yourself?” Tony asks, words slurred just the faintest bit.

“Had to get out here for a little bit, clear my head.” Steve pats the ground next to him, fingers tapping against the wood of the deck. “Needed a bit of solitude, I think.”

“Mind if I come out to be lonely with you?” asks Tony, and Steve pushes down the smile that plays at the corners of his lips. 

“Go ahead, I’m just being a downer.”

Tony doesn’t have to say anything - he tilts his head, inclining it towards the ocean, and Steve nods. _Peggy?_

“It’s always her,” he replies, answering Tony’s unasked question. “Me being here, waking up and moving on, forgetting about her -- it’s not _fair._ Not to her. Hell, the last time I celebrated a real Christmas was when I spent it with her. _”_

Tony scoffs, and Steve turns to look at him, something hesitant and vague in his expression. “Nothing’s _fair,_ ” he says, voice thick and words clipped. “But if you hadn’t come out of that ice, I’d still be dicking around in California instead of spending the holidays at home.”

A soft snort of laughter makes its way out of Steve’s mouth, unbidden. Turning his gaze back to the wide expanse of sea and sky in front of him, he raises his glass to his lips - the alcohol goes down slow and sweet, like honey, even if he can’t feel the buzz. “This is home, now? Two months ago you were aching to run away.” He feels more than hears the way that Tony pads up to the railing, leaning up against it with his elbows propped up on the cold metal, his gaze on the side of Steve’s face burning hot despite the chill in the air.

“Home is wherever JARVIS is, in my book,” he says. His words are measured, careful. “Or,” he amends, “wherever the people I care about are.”

There’s a click and an inhale, and the scent of cloves wafts through the icy night air. Steve looks up, first at Tony’s hand tucking the lighter back into his pocket and then at the cigarette between his full lips. “I didn’t know you smoked,” says Steve, eyebrow raised.

Tony laughs, the sound like music. “I don’t, really. Only when I want to look cool.”

Steve huffs a laugh and turns back to the railing. “You never look cool.”

There’s silence for a beat, the breaking of the waves cutting through the space in the dropped conversation. Tony pulls another drag from his cigarette, blows the clove-scented smoke out in a cloud, drops the half-finished stub to the sand below. “You’re not forgetting about her, you know,” he says, so quietly that Steve nearly misses it between the crash of one wave and the next. 

“What?”

“Peggy,” Tony clarifies. Steve’s heart does a painful little squeeze in his chest. “You’re not forgetting about her.”

“I’m moving on, though,” counters Steve, his tone bitter, acidic.

“Moving on and forgetting aren’t the same thing.”

“Aren’t they?”

Tony exhales through his nose, long and slow, and pushes himself upright. He tilts back on his heels, overbalancing but keeping his hands on the railing to avoid falling backwards. “Not exactly,” he says. “You can move forward and not forget about something. You can forget about it and still be stuck in the exact same place.”

“Which one are you?” asks Steve, keeping his eyes trained on the ebb and flow of the water.

“Which one do you think?” There’s a weight against Steve’s arm, warm and heavy, and when he gathers himself enough to look over Tony’s calf is pressed up against him. “I nearly lost Pepper five years ago. _Exactly_ five years, actually. You don’t think all the suit upgrades are for the hell of it, do you?.”

“Did you forget?” 

Tony pulls a face. “I tried to.” He’s silent for a second, then makes a noise like a startled little gasp, patting the pockets of his jacket. “I almost forgot this, though,” he says, “I have another gift for you.”

“What?” Steve blinks, his brain wading sluggishly through the shift in conversation to catch up to Tony. “No, come on, you didn’t have to-”

Tony cuts him off by bending down and pressing a present into his free hand - it’s small, about the size of a credit card, wrapped up in layers of gold foil and topped off with a miniature red bow. “It isn’t much, but I had the time and the negatives and I figured you might like it.”

Steve peels off the wrapper slowly, tucking his finger underneath the tape to slit it open instead of tearing the paper like he had done with his other gifts - somehow, it doesn’t seem right to mess it up, not with the lengths Tony had gone to in order to wrap it this nicely. The gift wrapping folds up easily under his fingers, pushed aside to show a hint of glossy paper underneath.

He forgets how to breathe.

Peggy stares back at him from the photograph in his hand, nestled snugly in a bed of wrapping paper and red ribbon. He _knows_ this picture, knows it like the back of his hand, remembers the day they had gathered around the photographer in war-torn Paris to watch him take it.

It’s not a very _good_ photograph, of course - nothing like what a little handheld box can do these days, but it shows what he needed it to show. Peggy stands dead center, half-turned to face the camera with a smile as wide as the Atlantic stretched across her face and a cardboard storage box in her hands, overflowing with files and loose papers. It was they day they had relocated Peggy to her promotional office, when they had brought in everything she owned and dumped it all onto the floor and then Dugan and Pinky had gotten rip-roaring drunk and played poker for hours on her empty desk.

Something cracks in Steve’s chest, and he thinks it might be his heart.

“You found this?” he croaks, once he manages to find some semblance of his voice again. Tony looks sheepish when Steve tilts his head up to get a better look at him; he rubs the back of his neck and keeps his eyes fixed squarely on the horizon. 

“Yeah, well,” he says, a chuckle in his voice. “Dad had a whole box of old wartime stuff tucked up in the attic. I figured I might as well get some use out of it.”

Steve doesn’t realize he’s crying until the tears drip from his chin, and he wipes them away with the back of his hand before they can fall onto the photograph.

* * *

Clint and Natasha giggle as they bundle into the backseat of the car, falling over each other to make space for Bucky climbing in behind them, Bruce and Happy up in the front. Steve pats Bucky on the back fondly, grinning when he turns to give Steve a cheery thumbs-up.

“Get them home safe, will you?” Tony calls from the porch, wrapped up in a bright purple throw blanket that somehow manages to offset the beachy paint of the house. Bucky mumbles something incoherent and waves him off, and Steve catches faint traces of Tony’s chuckle from behind him as he closes the door on the three in the car. They’re still laughing as Happy pulls away, heads back towards the city, the tail lights of his car fading into empty black shadows as it turns a street corner.

The night air is icy, but Steve doesn’t feel it. He’s still full of the warmth of the alcohol, nowhere near tipsy but pleasantly relaxed despite it. His veins feel like they’ve been hooked up to an electrical socket, sending electricity humming through him like a live wire, and when he hears the sound of footsteps on gravel he turns to face Tony with a smile and an _aren’t you cold out here_ on his lips. It dies away, though - Tony is closer than he had anticipated, leaning forward into his space as if seeking out his body heat, eyes a little glazed over in the same way Steve knows his own are.

“You didn’t go with them,” says Tony after a second, and his voice hits Steve like little pinpricks of heat in the cold, chasing away the winter chill with the lilt in his vowels and the alcohol-laden slur lacing his words. Steve shrugs.

“Not enough space in the car,” he says. “I’ll catch a cab.”

Tony laughs, and it sounds like bells and honey in milk and every sip of coffee he ever stole from Peggy’s cup in the 1940’s. “This isn’t the city, you know.”

Steve raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly out at the ocean. 

“No, I mean,” Tony starts again, breaking off to giggle. “You can’t just get another cab like that. As far out as I am, I have no idea when Happy will be back with mine.” 

Steve blinks at that, the gears in his head clicking into place one by one - he must have some kind of lost expression on his face, because Tony squints at him a little before bursting into a fresh wave of laughter. His shoulders shake under the cover of the blanket wrapped around them, his cheeks scrunching up as the corners of his lips curve up into a smile. The tip of his nose is red, Steve realizes, flushed with the cold, and it makes the gold flecks in his eyes stand out just a bit more. 

Tony is more open like this, he thinks. Here, way out on the outskirts of the continent, with the sea spray whipping up into the air and sending shivers up his spine and down his forearms - he couldn’t imagine Tony anywhere else. He had lived in the city, sure, had lived and worked and spent his life there, but Steve can’t imagine any way his eyes would light up quite as brightly without the open expanse of sky in front of them. Here, under the cover of night, Tony is radiant enough to outshine the stars, and Steve has to resist the sudden urge to trace the features of his face just so he can compare them to the constellations peeking out over the heavy line of the horizon.

“Come on, let’s go for a walk,” Tony says, tilting his head towards the waterfront. He pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders like a makeshift shawl, and Steve resists the urge to peel his jacket off and drape it over Tony’s thin frame.

“You’re not wearing any shoes,” he mumbles instead, but shoves his hands into his pockets and follows when Tony walks away without a reply.

He catches up when Tony makes it onto the sand, feeling his shoes sink in unpleasantly with every step. Tony slows down imperceptibly, matching Steve step for step until Steve gives in and kicks off his own shoes as well. On his left, the waves lap against the sand, high tide leaving them with little room to walk along the sand without their feet being drenched in icy water. Tony sticks close to Steve’s side, shoulders brushing through the blanket and the thick fabric of Steve’s jacket.

The high of the party is beginning to wear off, he can feel it - his head doesn’t hurt the way Tony’s will, hasn’t since he went into Erskine’s machine, and all that he can feel is the chill of the air and the burning warmth blossoming against his side every time he comes close to Tony. 

“She’d be happy for you, you know,” Tony says after a bit. They’ve walked a quarter mile or so, enough that the waterfront begins to pull away from the street. It feels more isolated like this - the only signs of life around them are the faint, amber glow of streetlamps in the distance and the empty lifeguard stands dotting the coast. When Steve looks over, Tony’s gaze is trained forward, a gentle curve to his mouth and his eyes half-lidded. “Peggy.”

It’s been a long day, a fun but tiring one, and Steve blames exhaustion for his inability to push away the dull ache in his chest at the reminder. “You think so?” he asks, looking away from Tony and back out along the Long Island coastline. Tony hums, a soft sound that barely reaches Steve’s ears over the cadence of the waves against the sand.

“You loved her, right?”

It’s Steve’s turn to go silent, then, and he rubs his thumb against his fingers inside the pockets of his coat. Tony doesn’t press him, doesn’t talk, just keeps walking and lets him think over his answer in silence. Steve kicks at the sand, feeling it give way and scatter out in front of him, scuffing his heels a bit as he walks.

“I loved her,” he says eventually, and stops walking. Tony takes a couple more paces forward before he seems to realize that Steve’s stopped, backtracking when he does. He sits down on the sand, patting the ground next to him.

It’s cold when Steve sits - he’s not used to the ocean in winter, when the air is icy and the water threatens frostbite or pneumonia to anyone brave or foolish enough to swim in it, and he can feel the chill against his legs even through his layers of clothing. Tony doesn’t seem to mind it, though, just lifts up one side of his blanket and reaches over to drape it around Steve’s shoulders.

Somehow, the press of Tony’s arm against his own is warmer than the blanket around him.

“I was going to ask her to marry me,” Steve says after a moment, and Tony goes stiff for a heartbeat before relaxing again. “The night I-”

He trails off, unable to force the words past the lump in his throat, but he knows Tony understands.

“Did she know?” asks Tony. 

“I think so,” Steve replies, stretching his legs out in front of him. The water laps at the soles of his feet, pinpricks of tingling cold not quite far enough up his skin to do any real damage. “We would talk about it, sometimes - the end of the war, moving out of the city into a little house in a quiet town. I wanted a dog, she wanted two.”

Tony huffs a quiet laugh through his nose.

“I thought I was going to marry Pepper, once,” he says, leaning back on his hands. Steve looks over at him, quirks an eyebrow.

“I thought you didn’t love her.”

“Oh, I love her,” Tony chuckles. “Loved her more than anything on Earth, really. Not the same as being _in_ love with her, though.”

Steve blinks. “I don’t get it.”

Tony smiles, and it looks small, sad. “Things are different, you know, for our kind of people-” He breaks off, and Steve barks out a laugh, prompting Tony to swat playfully at his shoulder. “I’m _serious_ , you ass. Even if I _hadn’t_ been a superhero, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.”

“I know, I know,” Steve says, raising his hands defensively and trying not to show his surprise at Tony’s confession. “Married to your job, right?” He elbows Tony on the last few words, and Tony shoves him good-naturedly.

“I do _not_ sound like that,” he whines, pouting ever so slightly. It’s cute, Steve thinks, the way his nose scrunches up like a petulant child whenever he goes into a mood. “Really, though - I thought I was going to marry her since _way_ before I ever gave her my company. I had the money, she had the common sense, no one else ever put up with me the way that she did. Not that any of that really matters now, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

Steve breathes out, watching the way his breath curls into smoke as it hits the air. “Why doesn’t it matter now? Why did it matter in the first place?”

“I’d have to give up the suit to marry her, wouldn’t I? And anyway, she runs the company, she doesn’t need me around to give her premature gray hairs on top of it.”

“So, what,” Steve says, pulling his legs back up to wrap his arms around his knees. “You left because you didn’t want to marry her? Even though you love her?”

“Not like that,” replies Tony. “And not exactly. I wouldn’t have minded marrying her, really - she got it, anyway. She didn’t care much whether or not we were an item, she was always more of a best friend to me. I couldn’t make her marry me if I couldn’t ever promise to come home.”

Steve goes quiet, mulling over his memories of Pepper and everything he’s learned about her over the two months he’s known her. Something clicks, a lightbulb going off in the back of his head. “Ah. You destroyed the suits?”

“I destroyed the suits,” Tony agrees. “I figured - if she saw that I could give it up, and I mean _really_ give it up, maybe we could try to make it work.”

“And in the end it didn’t, because-”

“Because I couldn’t give it up,” Tony says. “And Pepper hates it when I try to be all noble. I knew she’d talk sense into me, and I didn’t want that.”

“Five years now, then,” Steve hums, tilting his head to look up at the stars scattered across the velvet sky. “It’s been good to have you on the team, even if it means losing that.”

“Yes, well,” replies Tony, with a self-deprecating smile twitching on his lips. “I couldn’t just leave you hanging, could I? Besides, she’s got her hands full, and me taking an early retirement doesn’t mean the bad guys will stop trying to kill us every other week.”

They fall silent after that, letting the conversation drift off until the only sound in the night is the crashing of the waves against the shore. The tide recedes little by little, each new wash of water coming up just shy of the last, until the ocean is far enough out that Steve can stretch his legs out again without fear of getting wet. Tony is warm against his side - if Steve closes his eyes and focuses, he can feel the movements against his arm as Tony breathes, chest rising and falling in time with the crashing waves.

It seems so easy to kiss him, under the quiet hush of the waves against the shore and the cover of the twinkling stars - all he would have to do is lean over, close his eyes. It’s simple, so simple he hardly questions the fact that he _wants_ to kiss Tony, that he’s wanted to kiss Tony for a very, very long time.

Tony turns when he leans in, nose-to-nose and breathing the same air, close enough that Steve can feel the puff of warm air against his cheek when Tony exhales. _God,_ he wants this, wants it more than he has since Peggy died, and somehow the thought of her doesn’t hurt quite as much when he focuses on the little hints of hazel in Tony’s green eyes. He smells like cloves and vanilla, like Thanksgiving and Christmas all wrapped up with a bow under the air of sea spray.

Tony blinks, long and slow, and a melancholy sort of hopefulness reflects back at Steve when his eyes open again.

“Don’t,” Tony says, voice hoarse. “Not if you don’t mean it.”

Steve doesn’t.

* * *

He catches a cab back to the city half an hour later, the driver pulling up silent and tired when Steve waves him down. Something strange sits in the pit of his stomach the entire way home, chewing him up from the inside - he has the vague, lingering feeling that he might have to do some soul-searching, but his head is far too hazy to even consider it.

He’s dropped off at the door to his apartment building and he slides the driver a comfortable tip, stumbling out of the car and through the front door before the biting cold of late December can reach him. The hallways are lit with the dim glow of Christmas lights filtering through the cracks under the doors, the street visible through the window shining bright despite the fact that it’s nearing three in the morning. The city doesn’t _sleep_ so much as it dulls down, the usual bustle reduced to sparse traffic and a handful of drunken carolers singing off-key as they stumble down the street. It’s the kind of Christmas Eve that feels trapped in glass, encased in a thick layer of frost - not quite real, not quite happening, like watching the world go by in slow-motion.

Steve reaches up, touches his lips with two fingertips.

When he makes it into his apartment he shucks off his coat, sending up a silent _thank you_ for modern heating as the chill finally seems to seep out of his bones. He sends off a quick message to Natasha and Bucky, a simple _got home safe, good night._ He’ll see them in the morning anyway, he’s sure - he has a feeling they won’t let im hole himself up alone on Christmas day, and he’s a little surprised to realize he doesn’t _want_ to be alone.

It’s strange, he thinks, how much his life has changed in the span of six years. It feels as though he’s been stuck in limbo since he came out of the ice, running on auto-pilot and never really _trying_ to see past his grief, and all it took to change that was a new found family. He can’t really imagine his life _without_ all of them in it now, though, jarring as it is to think about. He’s got his weekly coffee with Nat and Bruce, he has Bucky because he’s always had Bucky, and-

And he has Tony.

Tony, who he had found almost by accident, who had stumbled into his life like a baby deer, too fast and too unsteady and trying so hard to find his footing that he didn’t realize he had people to lean on. Tony, who had filled his chest with machinery like he was trying to make a window into his heart instead of just saying the things he felt. Steve doesn’t quite know how, but somewhere along the way, Tony had become irreplaceable. It might be Steve at the center of their little patchwork family, keeping them all together like glue, but Tony is the one Steve keeps finding himself himself unable to tear his eyes away from.

He stumbles into his bedroom and strips off his shirt, tossing it blindly onto the laundry pile and fumbling through his drawers for a pair of sweatpants. Tony’s laugh filters through his head like a looping record, scrambling his thoughts until the only thing he can pin down is the tender look in Tony’s eyes when Steve had been about to kiss him. His fingers brush something hard in the drawer, he curls them around it and pulls out the little compass he had crashed into the ice with him.

For the first time since coming out of the Arctic, he doesn’t feel like the sight of it is about to send him into a breakdown.

The photograph is still there when he opens the box, sitting neatly in its holder. He hasn’t touched it in three years, not since before Peggy died, when he could still hold it up and compare it to the lines on her face. It’s cold to the touch, the metal icy when he pulls it out from the drawer. 

God, he had loved Peggy so much - so much he felt like a part of him died in the hospital with her. He had thought he would never get over her death for so long he never considered the possibility that he didn’t _need_ to get over it. 

Breathing in deep through his nose, he topples the walls in his chest on the exhale, letting the grief flood over him like a tidal wave.

He doesn’t notice the tears at first, not until he reaches up to rub at his eyes and stares at the way his hand comes back soaked and glistening. It’s cathartic, in a way - he’s not mourning, he was through with that a long time ago - it’s more a release of pent-up emotions than anything else. He lets himself cry, lets his shoulders shake, lets the wetness of his tears drip from the point of his chin and spread out in puddles across the backs of his hands.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket again, spins it in his fingers like a toy. The strange, clawing feeling still sits in his chest and nestles between his ribs like it’s trying to make a home in his lungs - inexplicably, the part of him that usually tries to run and hide doesn’t shove it down. He spins his phone again, pauses, unlocks it.

 _Sent 3:04 AM_ _  
__ > Merry Christmas _

_Sent 3:04 AM_ _  
__ > Sleep well _

His phone is silent, but when he wakes up in the morning, a text from Tony sits neatly at the top of his screen.

 _Received 5:45 AM_ _  
__ > merry christmas, steve. _

_Received 5:47 AM_ _  
__> you too._

* * *

The clock to the new year counts down in slow-motion -- Steve watches from his spot in the corner as his little family mills around the Tower’s penthouse, scrambling to get into position before the last strike of the clock. The flute of champagne in Pepper’s hand looks dangerously close to spilling over as she skirts the edges of tables and chairs, making her way to Happy’s side, Clint reaching over to fill Natasha’s flute with the bottle in his hand. The eight of them are enough to fill the room - like this, with soft Christmas music filling the air and garlands strung with ornaments draped around the windows, Steve can almost believe that he was always meant to be here.

His circle is small, his friends are few, but he loves them with more ferocity than he’s loved almost anyone. Peggy’s photograph sits in the pocket of his jacket, flush up against his heart, and as he reaches up to press a hand against it he catches Tony’s eye from the other end of the room. 

A slight blush is dusted across his cheeks, sitting red under his stubble and making the glow of his eyes shine even across the distance. His champagne flute is half empty, and before Steve realizes he’s moving he finds himself reaching over for the spare bottle to his side, raising it in an offer - Tony lights up, brushing past Pepper as he walks over. He puts a hand on her shoulder to steady himself, she turns and gives him a small murmur of recognition. Steve feels the phantom weight of Tony’s hand on his own shoulder, warm and comforting through the layers of his shirt and jacket.

“All by yourself?” asks Tony, rocking back on his heels once he’s close enough to speak. “It’s a small world, yeah, but we can’t possibly be that far into your little bubble all the way out here.” He sways, unsteady on his feet - for a single moment he’s in Steve’s space, breathing his air, and Steve’s heart does a strange sort of _thump-thump-thud_ in his chest as he catches the faint trails of grease and cologne in the air when Tony pulls back. He busies himself instead with refilling Tony’s glass, focusing on pouring straight and slow, not letting the champagne spill over the side.

Steve smiles, small and soft. “Well,” he replies, toying with the neck of the bottle in his hand. “You know me.” The corners of Tony’s mouth turn up at that, Steve watches the way the slight scrunch of his cheeks push his thick-rimmed glasses ever so subtly towards his forehead. A stray lock of hair, light brown and impossibly soft, falls across his left eyebrow, and the desire to brush it back into place flares up hot and aching between Steve’s ribs.

“Yeah,” says Tony, voice thick and weighed down with sweet alcohol. Something impossibly tender flashes across his face, softens his brown eyes and smoothes down the tension in his shoulders - it’s gone as soon as it comes, and Steve wants to chase it with his hands and his lips. “Yeah, I know you.”

The countdown begins behind them, Bucky’s deep tenor and Pepper’s cheerful voice ringing _ten, nine, eight_ across the empty space of the room, and Steve counts the seconds in the way the city lights filter through the dust in the air, the way it catches on the tips of Tony’s hair and turns them from dark brown to fiery, vibrant gold. His gaze goes from Tony’s hair to his eyes, his sharp cheekbones to his stubble to his lips. There’s something wild and untouchable about Tony like this, with his carefully curated exterior torn down by the spirit of the holidays. He’s so human that it _hurts,_ that it makes Steve ache with some vivid feeling that he can’t give a name to.

The clock strikes midnight - it’s January, it’s a new year, and somewhere in the distance Steve is vaguely aware of Clint leaning over to kiss Natasha soundly on the lips, of Bucky clinking his champagne flute against the others’ in a toast, and Tony blinks. His mouth opens in slow motion, tongue darting out to wet the seam of his lips, and Steve realizes with a heady spike of shock that _he wants to kiss Tony._ He could, too - the scent of the workshop fills his senses again and suddenly Tony is so close, swaying forward and letting his soft golden eyelashes brush the curves of his cheeks, and it would be _so_ easy, so simple for Steve to just lean in the few extra inches --

The moment passes, Tony rocks back on his heels again.

“Happy new year, Cap,” he says, with a trace of something in his voice that Steve quite can’t put his finger on. A glass appears in the air between them, and Steve absently brings up his own drink to tap against it. 

“Ah,” Steve replies, feeling a bit like he’s been turned inside-out. “Yeah, you too.”

* * *

Steve falls back onto his bed still in his suit, head still reeling from the almost-kiss. The walk back home had been brisk, cold enough to clear the sleep from his head, but he can’t quite shake the feeling in his chest - it had set in during the countdown, when Tony had been close enough that Steve could count each one of the sparse freckles on the bridge of his nose, and it just hadn’t gone away. It’s settled in the pit of his stomach now, curling hot and insistent in his gut.

Tony’s shirt had been undone at the top as he walked over, neckline pulled aside and collarbones sharp as they caught the light from the overhead lamps - 

Steve forces the thought down, reaching up to loosen the tie around his neck. He can’t really hide from it any longer - he’s attracted to Tony, has been for god knows how long. He might have realized it on Christmas, sitting out on the beach with Tony at one in the morning, but if he really thinks about it, he had been drawn to Tony since long before then. Maybe it was early in the month, when Tony had asked him to help with a retuning of the Iron Man suit, maybe it was the way Tony had looked up at him with hope brimming over his eyes like tears and whispered _thank you for bringing them back_ when Steve had narrowly saved the team from destruction in one of their countless skirmishes _._ Maybe it was the way Tony’s hands had pressed into his own, steadying and real and _alive._ Maybe it had been the first night, the night they met, when Tony opened the door and let Steve into his life, when he had bitten out insults and scathing words and then refused to let Steve fall away from him. Maybe it was the first time he saw Tony’s face, smiling out at him from a SHIELD data file, so many years ago it feels like a lifetime now.

They’re a pair, aren’t they - Steve too scared to hold on for fear he’ll have to let go, Tony too afraid to let Steve fade out of his life but still too nervous to stay in one place. Somewhere along the way, Steve had found something irreplaceable, and he feels like if he takes one step out of place, the entire illusion will shatter and fall to pieces like splintered glass. He wonders, not for the first time, if he’s irreplaceable to anyone. Him, _Steve Rogers,_ not the man in red, white, and blue. 

If he’s irreplaceable to _someone_ , in particular.

He picks up his phone, dials a number, lets it ring. Holding it away from his ear, he checks the time - nearly two in the morning, now, and the hum of the ring is small and tinny through the speakers. It rings, goes silent, rings again, goes silent again. Stays silent. 

“Steve?” comes Tony’s voice, distant and distorted. Steve presses the phone to his ear.

“Happy new year, Tony,” he says, at a loss for what to say. He hadn’t actually thought Tony would answer.

“You’ve said that already,” Tony laughs, breathless and a little slurred. His vowels come out slower when he’s drunk or tired, and now that he’s a combination of the two the musicality of it washes over Steve in tidal waves. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

Steve nearly laughs. He can’t possibly think about sleeping - not now, not with electricity humming through his bones, a live wire sparking in the dead of winter. “Shouldn’t you?”

“Fair enough,” Tony says, and Steve can hear the smile in his voice.

“Are you still at the tower?”

“Where else?”

On the street below, a car honks, three blasts of the horn in short succession. “Think you can sneak out for a walk?”

Tony’s tone is wry when he replies, and it makes Steve’s heart do an odd little tap dance against the bars of his ribcage. “And disobey Pepper’s instructions to stay put?”

“Since when do you do what you’re told?”

“Since never,” is Tony’s reply. “I’ll meet you at the river?’

Steve hums an affirmative, hangs up the phone, looks at his hands.

* * *

He doesn’t bother changing out of his suit when he makes his way up to the railing at the waterfront, but Tony seems to have swapped out his dress clothes in favor of a warm coat and scarf over jeans and what looks like a turtleneck peeking out from above the fabric of the scarf. His cheeks are pink with the cold, red dotting the tip of his nose, and his hair is a messy heap on top of his head, buffeted by the breeze coming off the river.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Steve says, just to watch the way it makes Tony’s face split into a smile.

“I will when you will,” replies Tony with a lopsided smirk, ducking his head to bury his nose in the scarf. Steve fights back a grin.

They walk along the riverbank side-by-side, the fog rolling in over the water and draping the entire street in a sleepy curtain, the streetlamps haloed in soft light where they cut through the haze. It’s silent, past two in the morning, and the cars that roll by stay silent. It’s just cold enough by the riverbank that they’re left alone - the new year’s parties spill out onto the main street instead, blocks away and far enough that the rowdy noise doesn’t reach them.

Steve feels like he’s in a bubble, like there’s an invisible barrier keeping the rest of the world away from him and Tony - it’s oddly reminiscent of Christmas eve, of the way they had walked together like this only the week before, with the water at his side and his hands itching to reach out and touch Tony’s skin. So much has happened since then, so much has changed - Steve _aches_ with the need of it all, with the sudden rush of feelings that had washed over him like a burst dam on the chime of the clock at midnight. Not for the first time, he wonders just how Tony had managed to enchant him so thoroughly. 

They pass a handful of people on their way down the river - drunken carolers singing Christmas songs off-key despite the fact that it’s hours into the new year, couples stuck so close together Steve could swear they were single figures.

“If we keep walking,” Tony says, “how long do you think it would take us to get to the ocean?”

“I think the ocean is behind us, actually,” Steve laughs.

“I was never any good at directions in the city.”

Eventually, they reach a little riverside park, a haven of green in the middle of the concrete jungle, and Tony swerves off the path to plunk himself down on the kiddie swingset. He’s comically oversized on it, knees bent past ninety degrees and feet still flat on the floor, but he makes a good effort to swing regardless. His heels kick up woodchips as they brush against the ground.

It’s been a long time since Steve’s set foot in a playground, and he finds himself laughing inwardly at the way he can forego the monkey bars altogether, reaching up to wrap his arms around the top support beam instead. With a bit of performative grunting and a lot of upper body strength he didn’t always have, he manages to clamber his way up onto the main part of the structure, swinging his legs as he sits on one of the structural beams extending out over the swing set. Tony looks up at him, head tilted backwards and a dopey smile on his face -- Steve is suddenly very glad he’s at the top of the structure, because he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to keep from kissing Tony if he was on the swings beside him. 

It has to be nearing three, the moon dipping low against the horizon. 

“Tired yet?”

Tony huffs a laugh. “Not really, but I bet I will be in the morning.”

“No one else stayed for the night?”

“Ehh,” replies Tony, shrugging. “Pep has her own floor, but she doesn’t use it much anymore. Nat and Clint are probably fucking in the vents again.”

They fall into silence, the only sound between them coming when Tony scuffs up the wood chips scattered across the park floor. It’s an easy silence, not quite the comfortable one Steve is used to around Tony -- but it’s simple, uncomplicated, punctuated only when the streetlamps hit Tony at a certain angle that makes the spark of affection flare up in Steve’s chest again. 

* * *

When the park clock chimes three-thirty, they walk back together, shoulders brushing - Steve drops Tony off at the lobby of the Tower, just a couple blocks away from his own apartment, savors the stilted beat after the goodbye when he realizes this is the point in a date where he’d kiss Tony goodnight.

“Not if you don’t mean it,” Tony says again, quiet and fragile.

Steve finds, when he leans in, that he really, truly _does._

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos super super appreciated <3


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